


Three Ghosts

by epeeblade



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Pre-Avengers (2012), SHIELD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 12:19:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17100473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epeeblade/pseuds/epeeblade
Summary: Three points in Phil Coulson's life that brought him closer to Clint Barton.





	1. First Ghost

Phil Coulson had been Agent Phil Coulson for only a handful of years. Certainly not as long as he’d been Ranger Phil Coulson. The suit still felt like it didn’t quite fit, even though it was just another uniform, no different than fatigues. It was like wearing camo of a different kind.

At the time Nick was still a friend. Not yet director, although the title Assistant Director fit him well. He’d been the one to recruit Phil, and at first, Phil had been grateful for the reprieve from the battlefield. He’d learned very quickly that they fought on a very different kind of field. SHIELD was at the precipice of a new world, and Phil loved the idea of being able to shape the future.

He always was a bit of an ass when it came to that front.

A new world required new weapons. Phil had been the one chasing down shadows, learning about a man called Hawkeye, who used to be a circus star, and now was very quite possibly a black market assassin. Phil wasn’t entirely clear on that. At times he thought there might be two Hawkeyes, because he’d find similar evidence - a crime committed with a bow and arrow - on opposite sides of the country at the same exact time.

It took him months, but Phil narrowed down the options on the man he’d come to think of as “his” Hawkeye. The one that didn’t kill, that took petty theft jobs, the one who seemed just one step ahead of the law. Still, it sometimes took more skill to not use lethal force, and Phil had taken the evidence to his superiors and asked permission to bring the man in.

“You sure about this, Cheese?” Nick looked through the manila folder. “Seems like a lot of work for a fancy named sniper.”

“You asked me to look outside the box. That’s what I’m doing. I see something there…” Phil couldn’t explain it. Not yet.

And so here he was, gun drawn as snow fluttered down from the night sky, turning the streets slippery and even more lethal. He and his team had manage to corner Hawkeye to this apartment building in Bed-Stuy, but had lost sight of him. 

For New York, the night was quiet, crisp. Phil couldn’t smell anything but the pureness of the snow, which was a miracle in itself considering the piles of garbage blocking the alleyways. 

His comm buzzed in his ear. “Nothing on the north side, sir. Sorry.”

Phil frowned. It looked like tonight might be a bust after all. He opened his mouth to order everyone to pack it in when…

“Phil.”

He startled. That voice...it belonged to a dead man. 

Specifically Private Matt Carson, a man who’d died making sure Phil had lived. It was a voice Phil heard in his nightmares, in the early hours of the night when nothing stirred but the dark spots of his brain. 

Phil whirled, wondering if he’d finally cracked. He didn’t hear it again, but he saw something, a pale shadow moving toward the alley covered with trash. He blinked, and for a second saw an army uniform, green against the gray of the wall, the snow glistening off the figure’s shoulders, but in the minute it took Phil to get to the alleyway entrance, it was gone.

But that didn’t stop him from going down the dark corridor…

To find an unconscious Clint Barton, bleeding from a gunshot wound in his leg. Phil hadn’t missed him after all.

“I have him. To my location, stat.” He knelt and started applying first aid.

He refused to think about what he’d just seen.


	2. Second Ghost

“Barton’s gone dark.”

The words made Phil’s heart sink. It wasn’t the gone silent of a mission that required it. No, Barton should have been in constant contact. He’d been charged with taking down the Black Widow, herself a ghost, a rumor, and someone Barton himself had doubted even existed.

“Come on, Sir? Someone with that many kills? Over decades? It’s a code name, not a person. A way for the Russians to take credit for everything up to and including the Kennedy assassination.”

“You think the Russians killed Kennedy?” Phil had raised an eyebrow, but couldn’t help the way his lips twitched. He always appreciated Barton’s honesty and candor. He’d been the sniper’s handler for just over a year now, and the two worked together exceptionally well.

Although that hadn’t been the case for Clint and his first handler. They didn’t discuss those days.

“Hell, at this point, it could have been aliens.” Clint thumbed another file they had been working on before this mission came up. Honest to goodness aliens. Phil couldn’t wait to get back to it.

But unfortunately, they had more concrete problems with deal with right now. “Regardless, we finally have intel on the Widow. It’s up to us to stop the killing.”

Clint had frowned. “Whatever you say, sir.”

That had been last weekend. What had happened to make Clint go dark? They’d been in constant contact, Phil operating from a hotel room in Rome, and Clint on the roof. The Black Widow had been seen in the highly touristy city and the rumor mill had her going after the Pope.

Which didn’t make any sense at all, but she had a reputation for taking any contract, no matter how insane. 

One moment Clint had been joking down the comms, and then his voice had changed. “I have a sighting.”

“Do you have the shot?”

For a moment, silence, then a ‘click’ the tell-tale sign of Barton turning his comms off.

That part Phil didn’t report in, only that Barton had gone dark. If they knew that Clint had willingly turned off his comms...well, then odds were Phil wouldn’t be chasing traces of Barton across Europe. 

It was gone round past 3 am. Phil had been up all night trying to sort out the threads of information, to stay one step ahead of SHIELD and catch up with Barton before his superiors turned the kill order on Clint himself.

“You know he wouldn’t do this without a good reason.”

“I know, Mom,” Phil replied absently, before remembering his mother had died six months earlier. He squeezed his eyes shut and dug the palms of his hands into his forehead. Fuck. He’d been awake far too long if he’d started hallucinating.

He felt her hand on his shoulder. “Clint is a good man. You know that. You told me that.”

Phil swallowed. He would not look. “Yeah, Mom, I remember.” He’d talked about Clint as his coworker, as the man he was developing a crush on, an agent he admired. His mother had listened, as she always did.

Clint had come with Phil to her funeral. 

“So think, Phillip. Why would he do this?”

Phil’s heart raced. She was right. Clint always had a reason, even if that reason wasn’t always apparent to anyone else. It was one of the things Phil admired about him, the ability to see the situation from different angles. Why wouldn’t he kill the Black Widow?

He must have seen something about her that caused him to make a different call.

Phil opened his eyes. “You’re right, Mom. Of course! He saw a reason not to kill her.” 

There was no one else in the hotel room with him. Phil swallowed. Hallucination, right. He grabbed his laptop and sent out a coded note to all of Clint’s secret accounts. Bring her in. I will take care of everything.


	3. Third Ghost

“I should have told you how I felt, Clint. Damn it. I shouldn’t have waited until I was dead to say anything.” 

Clint didn’t respond. Of course not. He didn’t know Phil was sitting right there, on the edge of Clint’s bed as Clint tossed and turned in what looked to be an unsettled sleep. Phil had watched, helpless, as Natasha bullied Clint out of the lab where Phil had met his untimely demise.

So Phil had followed, concerned that Clint would do something reckless. But Clint had only come home to his apartment in the city and fallen into bed without undressing first. Phil didn’t blame him. Clint had spent hours with the scientists in the lab, yelling and demanding to know what had happened to Phil.

Although Phil himself couldn’t quite recall what had happened. He’d been alive and now he wasn’t. Walking through walls had been his second clue, right after he’d followed one of the scientists through a door when the man refused to speak to him.

Turned out he didn’t even know Phil was there.

“I’ve met ghosts before, you know. Twice in my life. And they always lead me back to you. Maybe, just maybe, you might be able to hear me.” Phil sighed. He went to rub his forehead and then laughed at his own foolishness. He didn’t have a forehead left to rub.

“I always admired you. You should know that. You worked so hard, but nobody else could see. I did. I always saw you. Damn it, Clint.” 

Phil risked it, letting his hand fall onto Clint’s hair, stroking the blond strands, pretending he could feel them. What he wouldn’t give for a second chance, to tell Clint how he felt, to kiss him, feel his soft lips against Phil’s.

That was when the door to Clint’s bedroom slammed open.

Clint sat up, his eyes bloodshot and red, but wide-awake. He pulled out a weapon from beneath his pillow before setting the gun down and saying, “Nat? What the hell?”

Natasha Romanov stood in the doorway, holding a device that looked like a satellite dish on the end of a shotgun. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

Clint blinked at her. “What?”

“Phillip J. Coulson, you know the first rule of lab accidents is never. Leave. The. Lab.” She narrowed her eyes and looked around the room.

Phil blinked. He would say his heart started to race, but he didn’t have a heart anymore …

Now he remembered. The lab. They were testing a new device. Some kind of instantaneous teleportation. The beam had gone awry and Phil had been in the way. 

“Nat, what the hell are you talking about? Phil’s dead?” Clint tightened his jaw, and more than anything Phil wanted to comfort him.

“No. Coulson is out of phase. Which we figured out right about the time you left. They figured out how to reverse it, but no Coulson to be found in the lab. Clint, stay still.”

Before Clint could object, Natasha aimed the weapon right at him. Phil jumped in front of it, and after a blast of red light, fell onto Clint’s bed perfectly whole and solid. They both bounced with the force of his jump.

“Phil!” Clint gasped.

“Clint,” Phil said in return, sucking in a deep breath of air. It felt damn good to breathe again.

Natasha let the weapon drop. “There. Now, both of you, sort this out, please. The tension is driving us all crazy.” She slammed the door behind her as she left and Phil heard the tell tale sound a lock engaging. She’d locked them in!

Phil turned, still tangled up in Clint’s covers and opened his mouth to say something, anything.

But he didn’t have a chance to speak before Clint pounced on him and covered Phil’s lips with his own. Ah, so that was how it felt to kiss Clint Barton - shocking and exciting and little bit uncomfortable. 

“Phil, when I thought you were dead,” Clint pulled away long enough to say, “I kicked myself for never telling you how I felt.”

Phil put his hands on Clint’s shoulders and drew him close again. “When I thought I was dead, I thought the same. I’m absolutely positively crazy about you, Clint Barton.”

Clint’s cheeks went pink.

“Would you have dinner with me?” Phil swallowed, conscious of the fact that they were still on Clint’s bed and the rising heat between them.

Clint’s grin could melt butter. “I think it had better be dessert, don’t you?”

And Phil laughed.

**Author's Note:**

> Yay, I'm writing fic again!!!! 
> 
> This was inspired by A Christmas Carol, but it is not a Christmas fic. 
> 
> Thank you to Lapillus for the quick beta!


End file.
